This week at TPMCafe we'll be hosting the first week of a month of great Book Clubs. Getting things started: Todd Gitlin's The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.

In the book, Gitlin offers a landscape view of the Bush years and argues that liberals need a "big tent" Democratic Party to counter the bulldozer GOP. Gitlin explains in his introductory post:

The Democrats have no choice but to remain a big-tent party. The Republicans made the mistake of turning themselves into a bulldozer party, but they couldn’t bulldoze reality fast enough to keep from falling into a ditch. Now, if we don’t blow it, there’s a new center of gravity coming into American politics—not a flabby center of splitting differences, not a blah-blah of bipartisanship, but a new story and replenished values.